Dance teacher Jesse Philips-Fein (seated left) performed in Times Square this summer. Photo via nytimes.com.

Summer Professional Development grants for BFS faculty became a mainstay at the school under the guidance of former Head of School Dr. Michael Nill, so much so that the program has been renamed and generously endowed in his honor. Four development projects received support from the fund this past summer.

Family Center Coordinator Orinthia Swindell, Preschool 3s Head Teacher Vanessa Reynolds and Preschool Afterschool Head Teacher Claudia Lewis collaborated to create a central resource to support Preschool teachers in classroom discussions about race and diversity. Their physical and online archive also includes ideas for facilitating cross-curricular collaboration. Some of the funds were used to buy new classroom materials geared toward cultural explorations for young children, and to seek out assembly guests and performance artists including dancers, drummers and storytellers to help foster discussion among children about differences. Swindell also completed her first semester at the highly esteemed Bank Street College Early Childhood Leadership Program, which she called “a wonderfully enriching experience."

In the Lower School, Second Grade Head Teacher Jonathan Edmonds received a grant to streamline the content of each major study unit in the curriculum for second grade math teachers, including a delineation of goals, skills to be taught, and key activities in each unit, with a suggested sequence of lessons. This new resource includes information on intervention opportunities, open-ended problem solving activities, the key assessments for each unit, and a detailed list of websites, books and games available to teachers. All of Edmonds' work and research will be placed online in virtual binders so faculty can easily access them in class using the school's interactive whiteboards. He hopes this project will be modeled by other Lower School grade levels' math faculty.

Lower School Curriculum Coordinator Diane Mackie spent the summer designing a series of ninety-minute to two-hour workshops for assistant teachers on reading group instruction. The workshops present and examine assessment tools like individual book baskets, literature circles, reading journals, readers' theater, and teacher resource books available at each grade level, and the components and rationale for using each in the classroom.

Middle and Upper School English teacher and Middle School Humanities teacher Rachel Mazor investigated ways to integrate the school-distributed student netbooks into the sixth grade writing curriculum. She examined the use of web-based writing formats including Google Docs and blogging that might better enable students to share their work for peer editing, proofreading and publication.

Spanish and Latin teacher Michael Kabot in Pompeii.

And those were just the folks who received the in-school grants. Many faculty engaged in their own professional development over the summer and sought their own external funding. World Languages Chair and Upper School French teacher Tracy Bucci brushed up on her Italian in an intensive month-long course at the Università per Stranieri in the medieval city of Siena in Tuscany. Middle School Spanish and Latin teacher Michael Kabot received an NEH grant to visit Pompeii and Naples.  "I was in Stabia for two weeks and spent another two weeks in Rome," he explained, "as part of a Summer Institute for teachers studying the life of the ancient Romans."  Before the trip he and 23 other teachers from across the US spent a week attending lectures given by Italian history scholars and researching their own presentation topics at the College of Notre Dame in Maryland. "Mine was The Education of Roman Children."

History teacher Jesse Klausz in London.

Grades 6-12 Learning Specialist and Middle School US History teacher Jesse Klausz received a competitive grant paid for in part by the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History and in part by BFS to travel to Oxford University in the UK to study, of all things, Abraham Lincoln. The week-long residential seminar, entitled, The Age of Lincoln, was run by Prof. Richard Carwardine, author of the book Lincoln: A Life of Purpose and Power. Jesse explained that the decidedly British seminar, held at St. Catherine's College, "provides teachers with a very different perspective on the Civil War that we could share with our students. Many British historians are Lincoln scholars."

Middle and Upper School History Chair Ed Herzman spent his summer teaching New York City seventh graders in the famed Oliver Scholars Program, a highly competitive summer school that prepares low income African-American and Latino students for admittance to some of the region's top independent schools. Upper School History teacher Vlad Malukoff continued in his thirteenth year teaching at Prep for Prep, a similarly competitive program which prepares students of color for admittance to some of New York City's top independent schools and the region's top boarding schools.

Middle and Upper School dance teacherJesse Phillips-Fein's hard work this summer was of a more physical nature. She performed in Times Square as part of SpilLover, a response to the BP oil spill in the Gulf (she can be seen here in a New York Times photo of the street performance). She also choreographed and performed in the show i actually love this with the dance group Square One, and produced and performed in the 5^th Annual Women’s Works festival in Belfast, Maine to a score composed by BFS Middle and Upper School music teacher Jessica Jones. Jesse is currently hard at work choreographing a new work with BFS alum Emma Grace Skove-Epes.